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Television - Andrew Billen on a hyperactive series
Tony Marchant may be one of British television's best playwrights (and he may be, he may be), but he suffers a little from the symptoms that ailed young Danny in Kid in the Corner (Wednesdays, 9pm), his debut serial for Channel 4 that ended on Wednesday. Danny suffers from ADHD, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. He throws wobblies at school, and his sister's guinea pig down the stairs. He says "fuck" a lot and can recite chunks of The Simpsons, although he now prefers South Park. Out shopping with his parents, he performs a private version of Supermarket Sweep.
A deficit of attention was exactly the problem with Marchant's hatchet job on London, Holding On, two years ago. It jumped from restaurant critic, to Inland Revenue investigator, to cab diver, to schizophrenic, to . . . but, as they say on Ally McBeal, bygones. Hyperactivity is his worse vice: a histrionic tendency that can blow the naturalism of his pieces. Danny is described as a pack of nitroglycerine likely to go off at any minute. With Marchant you keep waiting for the explosion in the script, the violent bid for our attention.
In episode one it came even before the titles rolled when Alex, Danny's dad, told the sleeping boy: "Sometimes I wish you were dead." There was another, near the end, when Alex beat the boy up. Episode two made us wait for the end and Danny's attempt to hang himself. Wednesday's final instalment, however, surpassed them for Marchant Grand Guignol. Danny, who had not been taking his pills, stuffed a plateful of food into the mouth of his paralysed and wheelchair-bound grandfather at a wedding reception.
For most of the three hours, however, Kid in the Corner was so even and linear that it could almost have been an education video called So You Think Your Child Is Hyperactive. Marchant seemed to have jotted down on the back of an envelope the effects that a disturbed child could have on a family. First thing to go - obviously - was his parents' sex life. Next, we discover that Alex's creativity as a portrait artist dried up. His wife, Theresa, got a hard time from her cretinous parents, who thought she was too soft. Lucy, his sister, resented Danny and went mildly off the rails, or pretended to. There was even an attempt to make Danny responsible for the decision of his parents' best friends to have an abortion, as if they feared their next born might also be Regan from The Exorcist (Marchant's joke).
The problem was that none of these instances of collateral damage amounted to a sub-plot worth following. The obverse of this fault, however, was the focus it gave the main story. Douglas Henshall as Alex, whom we last saw as the mad shrink in Psychos, is now a truly compulsive actor: he hardly needed to do anything to let us know that his temper was fraying most of all at his own paternal inadequacies. As Danny's mother, Clare Holman was also remarkable, the more so since Marchant had made Theresa the Woman Who Can Do No Wrong. Brooke Kinsella as Lucy gave an unselfish performance as Danny's 14-year-old sister, a girl far too used to the rituals of her brother's moods. Eric Byrne, the 12 year old who played Danny, was simply one of the best child actors I have seen on British television (and since this is not saying much, I'll compare him to the American child lead in Sixth Sense, which is high praise).
The story was really the search for Danny's cure, and you half hoped it would be a harder hunt than it was. After a promising wrangle with a useless marital counsellor, who said things to Theresa such as "Do you feel you own the problem on your own?", most of the institutions called upon were peopled by gentle and helpful souls. The caring residential home into which Danny was finally plopped was not even threatened with closure. Even the miracle drug worked.
As the fight against institutional ignorance dwindled away, we turned for entertainment to the battling emotions inside Alex. The final scene had him surprise Danny in his dorm on his first night away. Alex covered his son's face with 2am kisses. "He's just a bit overexcited," Danny told his room-mate. "We hope he'll grow out of it." It was a cute line and one that brought a tear to the eye. My God, I thought, if Marchant is going to add sentimentality to his repertoire of tricks, there will be no stopping him. This was not vintage Marchant, but after his triumphant BBC adaptation of Great Expectations earlier this year, it made me want him to return to the subject of childhood soon. His excitability suits it. I hope he doesn't grow out of it for a while.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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